Archive for September 2010

My daughter, at 3 1/2, has an intense interest in scissors. I can’t figure out if the scissor fascination is a result of the fact that she is surrounded by a mama, aunt and grandma who are all intensely crafty women, or if it’s because I have 4 pairs of scissors in my flower pot of pens & other miscellany. My floor is littered with tiny scraps of paper. Strips and triangles and zig-zags and slivers and parallelograms. She is industrious in her snips, narrating who each piece is for, telling a story with each cut.

I wonder at the strength of one’s DNA coupled with one’s environment. Imagine it all coming together to create the next generation’s version of Martha Stewart. Huh.

I didn’t think this would be so hard. Caring so much is part of the reason why I find myself here at all. It is both my grace and my fall from it. I have always cared more about what he thought than about my own well-being. This is historical. I have done this for as long as I have sheltered love in my heart, for as long as I have yearned to share the deepest, innermost bits & pieces of my soul. Such a cliché. I am textbook, making myself into the codified image of another’s desire. I never quite understood how doing that would leave no room for me.

I talked to a lawyer. I told him and his paralegal how things had become over the past few years – the oddities and the way our marriage had veered so far from what I had imagined for myself back when I actually still thought about how my marriage might be. Those dreams and wishes and longings didn’t include stock-piling food in the garage nor guns hidden beneath the house nor silver buried in the backyard. My hopes didn’t include the unilateral cancellation of Christmas, like some peevish Sheriff of Nottingham, followed by Easter then Halloween, with an eye on birthdays in the foreseeable future.

My dreams have always been colored in a palette rich with the hues of family traditions. My hopes are awash in the smells of my memories – wood smoke winters and mustard field springs, blackberry thicket summers and damp leaf autumns. My fancies overlap my childhood with my daughter’s, always centered in the warmth of a kitchen – Valentine’s Day cupcakes, St. Patrick’s Day Corned Beef, Easter eggs, Mother’s Day brunch, Father’s Day barbecues, Fourth of July blackberry pie, Halloween candy making, Thanksgiving pies, Christmas cookies. How does one make a home? How does one make a family? Do you have these hopes and then just let go of them, one by one? We didn’t start out 10 years ago with dreams of stock-piling supplies in case of Armageddon. But somehow that’s where we arrived.

The lawyer and his paralegal glanced at one another. They stared at me, then shook their heads. “You’ve become desensitized, you know,” he told me. His assistant nodded her head. “You said you never talked about any of this to anyone. And now you’ve become desensitized. Do you know how NOT normal it is to bury silver in your backyard?”

I look back at him. I shrug. “The only way I knew how to cope was not to talk about it.” Talking, now, is a relief. I think of the 600 pounds of grain and flour and beans, labeled in 5 gallon buckets, slowly souring in the late summer heat of the garage. He left with the silver and the guns; I remain with the rancid wheat berries and cans of tuna in oil.

That it must come to an end isn’t a question. My difficulty lies more in the fear that I will somehow harm this man. And I am reminded of how I have done this in the past. Cared more about someone else than they cared for me. Overcoming this fear is crucial. The courage required seems like it should be a no-brainer. It shouldn’t be so HARD. I think of what the lawyer has suggested I ask as part of the divorce and I know it will set him off. I know he will riot in ways I can’t begin to comprehend.

I am taking a hiatus from my business. It burns too much. The uncertainty of my future, the fickle nature of clients who misinterpret the best of intentions. Coupled with the double hit of divorce and a weighty financial albatross.

I wrote to a friend this morning who lives near London. Told him how empty everything feels inside, but mangled and weird, too. Like a hamster ball of frenetic and chaotic energy in my belly, bonking around my intestines and gall bladder, but not escaping the hard casing.

I keep busy; pulling weeds, moving furniture, changing the scenery. Emails from my husband set my teeth on edge. I want him to file for divorce and be done with it; it felt devastating at first. Now it just doesn’t feel like anything. I haven’t returned the phone calls of the bankruptcy attorney that I contacted. I make breakfast for my 3-year old daughter. She goes to daycare. I try to figure out what to feed myself, and drink coffee instead. I don’t hear my cell phone ring. I make lists of things I need to do. I have piles of crap in the garage I have removed from the house to sell or give away. A 3-car garage filled to the gills with the history of my life. Of a life once shared.

I don’t feel sad. I only feel that hard ball in my belly, rolling around, knocking against the vacant places. And the scrabbling of the weird flurry caged within, clacking around, trying to get loose.

It’s been so long since I have ventured into this shared and public space. I am not sure how I feel, other than I find it difficult to say much of anything. I am numb. Grasping at straws whilst gasping through straws whilst treading water in the deep end of the ocean.